Microsoft Firm on Windows XP Closure Date

Especially the small and medium sized enterprise customers must decide on their strategy to embrace this situation

With Microsoft announcing the expiration date for one of its biggest success stories in the form of Windows XP, there are many enterprises which have not yet started or even thought about the migration towards latest Windows products. However, the company is quite sure to discontinue its service and support after April 8^th, 2014.

“We would be discontinuing the support for Windows XP on 8^th of April. However, we will provide XP support to companies, which agree to pay us a support fee. This is a global strategy and will be applicable in India as well,” informs Amrish Goyal, General Manager, Windows Business Group, Microsoft India.

This is in line with Microsoft’s thinking to discontinue the XP operating system. However, there are many enterprise and even government customers who have not designed any specific strategy to switch over to something modern and completely next generation ready.

Terming its channel partners as a critical piece towards enhancing the company’s profitability, Microsoft has confirmed that the company has announced certain incentive based schemes in order to better entice its partner ecosystem in India.

“We have huge expectations from this. I am not in a position to disclose the exact nature of such schemes, but yes we do have such schemes running in the market where a partner can benefit with us while helping towards migrating the enterprise segment by making their customers aware of security benefits with Windows 8, “he adds on.

On the enterprise side, while big organizations have surely devised their strategy to either embrace Microsoft’s upgrade or the Linux way. There are small organizations which still face an uphill task towards devising a migration strategy.

“We have a small set up here with about 50 systems. We installed Windows XP many years back and have invested a huge sum of money. Now we have to invest again. This is proving to be counter-productive and now we are looking at virtualising selective applications and have to go for an OS upgrade,” informs an IT manager at an enterprise on conditions of anonymity.

As we come close to this announced date of April 8^th 2014, there will many companies which will embrace the next generation technologies, however one thing is for sure that many organizations which will pull the plug from using Microsoft and find their own way to better utilize their IT infrastructure.